No results.
Dryden tried the same search for all of Texas; maybe Holly lived outside of town and commuted.
No results.
He opened a Google map, zoomed in on Amarillo, and searched for hospitals. There were three large ones and a number of smaller practices, almost all of those simply named for a doctor working privately. None of the private doctors was Holly Ferrel.
Dryden checked the Web sites for each of the three big hospitals and navigated to the staff pages. The third one yielded an interesting result: a doctor named Holly Reese, whose bio was conspicuously missing a photograph. Every other doctor working in that hospital had included a face shot.
For the sake of being thorough, Dryden navigated through every page on the hospital’s site that might contain photos of its staff, promotional stills of doctors at patients’ bedsides or working in labs. He was on the next-to-last such page, about to click the BACK button, when Rachel’s hand shot out and stopped him from touching the mouse.
“What?” he asked.
Her finger went to the screen. In a photo at the bottom, an EMT crew and a few ER docs were rolling a stretcher in off a rooftop helipad. The chopper was visible in the background, bright red and filling most of the frame.
Rachel was pointing to a woman standing just inside the corridor, half turned away from the camera. Because the camera’s aperture had adjusted to deal with the sun-washed helipad, the hallway in the foreground appeared very dark. It would’ve been easy to look right at this photo and not even see the woman.
“Is it her?” Dryden asked.
Rachel leaned closer to the screen. She narrowed her eyes.
“I’m sure of it,” she said.
Dryden stared at the woman’s face a second longer, running the implications through his head. It wasn’t unheard-of for a relocated person to hold on to a first name; the risk was minimal, and it made the transition easier, psychologically.
Holly Ferrel.
Holly Reese.
Different last name, and no photo on her bio page.
She wasn’t just in danger. She was hiding from it.
At least she believed she was hiding.
Dryden went back to the Yellow Pages and searched for Holly Reese in Amarillo.
One entry. Complete with address.
Dryden found it on the Google map ten seconds later, the photographic overlay showing a marker right above the house.
Holly lived close to downtown, on a street of narrow homes jammed together. Dryden opened Street View and got a look at the place from eye level, out front. It was the Texas equivalent of a town house like you might see in Brooklyn or Georgetown. Others of the same size lined the street on both sides, most of them adjoining their neighbors, a few with narrow alleys in between.
“If she’s still alive, you think Gaul’s people are watching her,” Rachel said. Not asking.
Dryden nodded. “Have to assume it.”
“So how do we contact her?”
“I want to know more about her before we do that,” Dryden said. “I believe you when you say she’s someone who cared about you, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to go introduce ourselves.”
He studied the layout of the street, his thoughts going to the eavesdropping equipment he’d used so often in his time with Ferret. A good laser microphone would be useful; it could be pointed at one of Holly’s windows from down the block and pick up sound from inside by measuring vibrations on the glass. It was decades-old technology, very reliable.
Very hard to come by, too. You couldn’t get it at RadioShack or Best Buy.
Rachel put her hand to the screen again. She pointed to the narrow homes on either side of Holly’s. “Do you think we could get inside one of those? Maybe if no one was home?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible. A lot of buildings like that are broken up into apartments. If we got lucky, there might be a vacant one.” He turned to her. “What are you thinking?”
“How wide are those houses?”
Dryden shrugged. “Twenty-five, thirty feet.”
Rachel turned and stared on a diagonal across the library, to the young boy reading alone. “How far away do you think he is?”
Dryden considered the distance. “Sixty feet, maybe a little more.”
Rachel faced forward again and shut her eyes. She took on the expression of someone trying to make out a just-audible voice over a bad phone line. Then she spoke as if she were reading from a page. “Well, he’s dead now hisself. He knows the long and short on it now. And if ever a rough hand come to port, it was Billy. Right you are, said Silver. Rough and ready. But mark you here, I’m an easy man. I’m quite the gentleman, says you. But this time it’s serious. Duty is duty, mates. I give my vote. Death.”
She seemed about to continue, then let it go. She opened her eyes and met Dryden’s.